New Centre for Macroeconomics launched at LSE

A new £5million Centre for Macroeconomics will bring together a group of world class experts to carry out pioneering research on the global economic crisis and help design policies to alleviate it.

Chaired by LSE’s Nobel Prize-winning economics professor, Christopher Pissarides, the new centre will encompass experts from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), University College London (UCL), Cambridge University, the Bank of England, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), and other leading global institutions.

Five major research programmes will address the key issues of unemployment, fiscal austerity, financial markets, shifts in the world economy, and the development of new methodologies. It is hoped that new methodologies and better communication with policy makers will enhance the research and will lead to better policy decisions.

Professor Pissarides commented: "The new centre will be engaged in path-breaking research that gets to the heart of current debates and puzzles about the economy and the on-going recession. It became obvious soon after the start of the financial crisis that we did not have the tools to understand it, and were consequently less able to recommend policies to combat it. It also became obvious to us that globalisation and financial development had changed the nature of macroeconomic fluctuations, requiring many different skills within macroeconomics. The new centre is bringing together a diverse group of top experts in the field, who will work together to shed light on the very complicated set of problems facing policy makers today."

The centre is being funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the UK’s largest funder of research on economic and social issues.

The centre’s co-directors are Wouter Den Haan, Professor of Economics at LSE, and Morten O. Ravn, Professor of Economics at UCL.

Professor Ravn commented: “Over the past five years unemployment, fiscal austerity and instability in financial markets have posed serious challenges for the UK and much of the world economy. New research and better communication between economists is needed to address them. Our foremost aims are for the centre to provide first-rate research into macroeconomic aspects of these issues and to provide leadership and focus for UK macroeconomists and their interaction with policy makers. The centre will give policy makers access to cutting edge research and provide academics with stimulus from policy circles.”

Professor Den Haan commented: “We will not be shy in exploring new approaches to the questions currently facing us. We hope to develop economic models that are better suited to deal with large shocks like those we recently experienced and that can better capture the complexity of the real world.”

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is the UK's largest organisation for funding research on economic and social issues. It supports independent, high quality research which has an impact on business, the public sector and the third sector. The ESRC’s total budget for 2012/13 is £205 million. At any one time the ESRC supports over 4,000 researchers and postgraduate students in academic institutions and independent research institutes.

The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) studies the social sciences in their broadest sense, with an academic profile spanning a wide range of disciplines, from economics, politics and law, to sociology, information systems and accounting and finance.

The School has an outstanding reputation for academic excellence and is one of the most international universities in the world. Its study of social, economic and political problems focuses on the different perspectives and experiences of most countries. From its foundation LSE has aimed to be a laboratory of the social sciences, a place where ideas are developed, analysed, evaluated and disseminated around the globe. Visit http://www.lse.ac.uk for more information.

Founded in 1826, University College London (UCL) was the first English university established after Oxford and Cambridge, the first to admit students regardless of race, class, religion or gender and the first to provide systematic teaching of law, architecture and medicine.

It is among the world's top universities, as reflected by its performance in a range of international rankings and tables. According to the Thomson Scientific Citation Index, UCL is the second most highly cited European university and the 15th most highly cited in the world.

UCL has nearly 25,000 students from 150 countries and more than 9,000 employees, of whom one-third are from outside the UK. The university is based in Bloomsbury in the heart of London, but also has two international campuses – UCL Australia and UCL Qatar. Our annual income is more than £800 million.

Use of this website is subject to, and implies acceptance of, its Terms of use (including Copyright and intellectual property, Privacy and data protection and Accessibility). The London School of Economics and Political Science is a School of the University of London. It is a charity and is incorporated in England as a company limited by guarantee under the Companies Acts (Reg no. 70527).The registered office address of the School is: The London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK; Tel: +44 (0)20 7405 7686